The Isfahan Archive Project 2025 Proposal Development Grant is an ambitious endeavor to create a digital archive of family anthologies produced in the city of Isfahan, Iran, which was the capital of the Safavid dynasty from 1591 to 1722. Whether as bureaucrats working for the chancellery, poets composing and copying their favorite verses, literati writing model letters, or religious scholars collecting treatises, the residents of Isfahan compiled their written lives into codices that served as professional tools and mobile devices that facilitated social interaction. The Isfahan Archive Project will reassemble digital surrogates of hundreds of Persian manuscripts from the seventeenth century to bring people’s lives into view from a city with no extant state or civic archives. Our team engages a community of scholars, librarians, archivists and graduate students, each sharing their expertise and labor, to remake a lost archive. We will create a digital and searchable database of Isfahan’s anthologies where fellow scholars and graduate students across the world may freely have access to these rich Persianate-world sources. For the western academy, which has been forced to sever contact with Iran since the Islamic Revolution of 1979, such an open public access resource will make intellectual and pedagogical exchange possible in the face of political borders.
The Isfahan Archive Project
